That is the wrong question to ask and any answer is not going to help you. What matters is the execution. By properly targeting my audience, I am achieving nearly 4% for one client. It's 0.3% for another but the goal there is very different.

A ctr between 2% to 3% is really awesome, anything more then 3% except for there own terms (brand name etc) is something u need to look on and anything less then 1.5% is seriously damaging your business and costing you high cpc.

I think a good CTR should be 8 to 10%? What is your goal for the adword? If you want to close your target, you need buying kw. If its location related, you need to set your area. You need to keep changing until you get to 10% CTR.

Why would something be wrong if you get a 10% CTR? Quite the contrary, it means you are likely doing something very right. I think he was saying a 10% CTR on search which is different than display, what the OP was talking about. Still, don't know why you say it's not "recommendable".

If you laser target your market, you will get great results. I have an ad achieving a 14% CTR in a display campaign and it converts at 8% too. It generated $427 on an ad spend of $24 (84 clicks) in the last few months. Why would I stop it? My client would wonder too why I'm decreasing his profits.

The whole point of advertising is to increase traffic. Properly targeting your prospects is one way as is having great ads with high CTR. Nothing abnormal about that and in fact highly recommended. Your solution seems to be *not* to maximize traffic and hence revenues and profits. That to me is abnormal.

@extreme90:
You always want to improve your CTR, always! Never be happy with what you are on...always keep experimenting and testing!
Why are you afraid of high CTR? You understand the term? Click Through Ratio - where the number of Users seeing your ad is divided by the number of clicks on your ad. You want as high as possible!!! 10% means 10 in 100 people that sees your ad have clicked on your ad. 3% means 3 out of 100 people that saw your ad clicked on your ad. Why are you thinking lower is better? If its lower, you will be charged more for the CPC, and you wasting your money.

First test your CTR (higher your CTR the cheaper your adword cost per click is; plus you know you are laser targeting your current target market).
Secondly, always test your Landing Page conversion too. DONT test CTR and Landing Page conversion at the same time. You want to keep same variables, so you can isolate WHY you are getting the results you are getting.
- you could be getting low CTR because of your industry. All industries are different, so all CTR will be different. But 3% I would not be happy with ... I think the average happy CTR % is 8 to 10%.
Also, its not the brand name you are talking about. You just have to keep playing with all the adword variables and test for your market.

There is another method, where you don't care about the CTR, and just focus on Landing Page conversion...but this will make your adword cost more as you will be charged higher for your adword CPC.
If this is your game, you want to change it and do a divide and conquer approach - so focus on teach keyword individually and test it for high CTR and Landing Page conversion. So you do lots more adword group segmentation.

I hope this helps, if not - just ignore and keep doing what you are doing!

@extreme90:
You always want to improve your CTR, always! Never be happy with what you are on...always keep experimenting and testing!
Why are you afraid of high CTR? You understand the term? Click Through Ratio - where the number of Users seeing your ad is divided by the number of clicks on your ad. You want as high as possible!!! 10% means 10 in 100 people that sees your ad have clicked on your ad. 3% means 3 out of 100 people that saw your ad clicked on your ad. Why are you thinking lower is better? If its lower, you will be charged more for the CPC, and you wasting your money.

First test your CTR (higher your CTR the cheaper your adword cost per click is; plus you know you are laser targeting your current target market).
Secondly, always test your Landing Page conversion too. DONT test CTR and Landing Page conversion at the same time. You want to keep same variables, so you can isolate WHY you are getting the results you are getting.
- you could be getting low CTR because of your industry. All industries are different, so all CTR will be different. But 3% I would not be happy with ... I think the average happy CTR % is 8 to 10%.
Also, its not the brand name you are talking about. You just have to keep playing with all the adword variables and test for your market.

There is another method, where you don't care about the CTR, and just focus on Landing Page conversion...but this will make your adword cost more as you will be charged higher for your adword CPC.
If this is your game, you want to change it and do a divide and conquer approach - so focus on teach keyword individually and test it for high CTR and Landing Page conversion. So you do lots more adword group segmentation.

I hope this helps, if not - just ignore and keep doing what you are doing!

Click to expand...

If someone is receiving 8 to 10% CTR, then there is wrong, either you have just read and assuming everything or it's just in your mind.

Extreme, I showed you my numbers earlier. A ROI of nearly 18, CTR of 14%.

What I would like you to explain is why you think that is abnormal or is wrong. I'm always open to learn and understand. Convince me, tell me why it's wrong and I'll stop doing it. I want to help my clients.

Just to clarify something, i am talking about content discovery at the end of an article and i wonder how one gets 14% CTR. I don't say it's impossible, but my numbers are far away from that. What kind of content do you promote? Noncommercial, Advertorial, Advertisement?

And i don't really get it what people mean with " If you target the right ...", because i can hardly target anything else but the country & language. I don't know what kind of network you guys use.

The campaign I'm referring to is for a client that sells tool parts, a particular type of tool and for this particular campaign, a specific brand and model. In this case where I'm getting a 14% CTR, I am placing ads (Adwords) on this site (obviously part of Google's Adsense ad network) that is basically a question and answer site where people typically ask what is wrong with their tool and how to fix it. The answers are often "you need to replace this part" and my ads mention that the part can be bought from my client.

This is what is meant by targeting your customer. I am not going to target a page where the talk is about a different type of tool or a different brand. It makes less sense and the numbers would not be as good. By proper targeting, I not only achieve a great CTR but also the conversion rate was 7% in 2015, which is slightly better than the search ads, curiously enough. This is one group in the campaign and I chose the best performer in my example but in 56 similar campaigns, the overall CTR is 3% with a conversion rate of just over 4%. Not bad numbers but looking to improve.

So let's say you sell brakes for Ford Taurus. You target pages where the talk is about brakes for that brand and model of car. It would not make sense to advertise the product on a page for other Ford models, much less for other car brands. Even better if the talk is about brake issues with that model.

You talk about content discovery, I'm guessing ads delivered by Taboola and Outbrain, although you could do the same using Adwords or any other ad network. The idea is the same: find pages that discuss what your page is about and advertise there. I'm guessing you have a product to sell that would provide a solution to a problem that is being discussed on those pages. That's how you target using a content network.

By the way, the above results are with text ads. I do have another campaign for this client using banner ads. They don't do as well with a 0.5% CTR but that's typical with banners. The important metric in Adwords is Relative CTR, equivalent to QS in search, which is 1.8, the same as the text ads. This means my CTR is 80% higher than others placing ads on those same sites. That's the campaign average, a few groups are over 2.0, twice as good as the average ad so I know my ads are doing the job of getting quality traffic for the client and by extension that I'm properly targeting. So I would not make too much of a perceived low CTR on content networks. Do try to improve it but figuring out what people want and need.

Just to clarify something, i am talking about content discovery at the end of an article and i wonder how one gets 14% CTR. I don't say it's impossible, but my numbers are far away from that. What kind of content do you promote? Noncommercial, Advertorial, Advertisement?

And i don't really get it what people mean with " If you target the right ...", because i can hardly target anything else but the country & language. I don't know what kind of network you guys use.

Thanks for your answer!

Click to expand...

You dont understand cause people are answering with the wrong context. You are clearly talking about Native, and they are talking about Adwords. So to answer your question: a 'good' CTR on Content.ad, for instance, it's going to be around 0.20% - 0.30% with NON Commercial ads. If that's what you're asking. I've achieved that, after a LOT of testing with my content. I've been buying from them for Commercial and Non commercial also. But it's still expensive traffic, if you are truing to send it to your Content site and convert it then with your widgets. Is that what you are doing?

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